Spectrum
by VKlepto
Summary: Their relationship has never been easy to define or maintain, but if nothing else, they can honestly say it's colorful.
1. Red

_A/N: For those of you reading Cat and Mouse, don't freak. I'll be updating in a day or so. I've just been wanting to do this for a while, so brief intermission! _

_This story will be seven chapters long, and not necessarily linear, but each chapter will be based on the colors of the rainbow, or, if you're seven like me, ROYGBIV. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Each story will also be prefaced with a quote that I think exemplifies the "color", or rather what the color means. Uh, so that's all!_

* * *

"_Passion, it lies in all of us, sleeping... waiting... and though unwanted... unbidden... it will stir... open its jaws and howl. It speaks to us... guides us... passion rules us all, and we obey. What other choice do we have? Passion is the source of our finest moments. The joy of love... the clarity of hatred... and the ecstasy of grief. It hurts sometimes more than we can bear. If we could live without passion maybe we'd know some kind of peace... but we would be hollow... Empty rooms shuttered and dank. Without passion we'd be truly dead."_

* * *

Red is the color flashing behind her eyes as she watches the other woman on his arm. It's the color of his robes, and, she thinks, a quaint and ironic representation of her anger. It's the color of the wine in his glass and the spark behind his eyes as he looks uneasily at her from across the room. Red is the color his skin turns as the other woman squeezes his arm; it's the color his cheeks burn as he pats her hand and looks away, following her to the dance floor.

The centerpiece at the table she sits at is red roses; the old woman sitting next to her sips red punch with her fingers and lips painted red.

Things tonight are so cut and dry, but not black and white. No. Tonight, it's all red.

She downs her drink, enough of it not to notice that it too is red, and stands unsteadily. She approaches the dance floor knowing that her face is red and that she is conspicuously solo.

Seeing, feeling, tasting, breathing, _being_ red, she asks to cut in, and he is clearly surprised. He smiles, and the curve of his lips is red like his cheeks as he takes her into his arms; the other woman fades into a slip of red, a drop of blood retreating, a train wreck she can't look away from. Red. It surrounds her, fills her with such crimson intensity that she feels ill with emotion as he spins her, twirls her, his robe like a rose on the floor. A rose like the centerpiece, she thinks, and she brushes off the symbolism angrily in favor of the silence he drowns her in. She wants to scream, yell, slap him, hurt him, because he always hurts her, his absurd naivety acting as a shield to her red-hot anger. He really, truly doesn't understand, so she can't shouldn't won't but is mad at their circumstances and the actions he makes beneath the shroud of blissfully unaware.

When he leaves her side with a kiss to the back of her hand, she sees red once more, and practically gives him whiplash with the rapidity of her withdrawal from his touch. Later, she watches him leave with the other woman. She follows them, acts as though she simply chose to leave at the same time, as though coincidence and not the color red has led her to interrupt their farewells. He kisses the woman who is decidedly not her on the cheek, and when he finally, fully turns to her, she wants to be sick. He says her name, and she hates the way his voice seems to own it. He tries at first to ease her, to alleviate the red that has swallowed her so wholly, and she spits something back at him, feels her face growing redder and redder with either anger or embarrassment; she isn't sure.

"You are a child," he proclaims angrily, and once more she's spinning in red. There are so many implications in that one word -- _child_. She stumbles as though she has tripped on it, and of course he catches her, supporting her steadily with his arm around her waist.

She remembers when she _was_ a child and he only acted like one. She remembers tying a red ribbon in her hair. She remembers also that he keeps the same ribbon in a drawer in his desk, because later that same day he had unwrapped it from her ponytail. She feels a tear on her red, blistering skin and wipes it madly away, falling against his chest. They leave and the red follows like static, bitter and biting between them. When they kiss, red fills her world.

Red is thick, she thinks, knows. Thick like sap, but malleable and mobile as water, filling every crevice until there is nothing left. All-encompassing, inexorable. Red is the backlight of hate, anger, love. Red makes one spit fire and spout sonnets. Red is passion. Red is pain and grief and stinging betrayal and foolish love -- red is an expression of impossibility. Red is, she thinks, all of the reasons she avoids emotion, all of the reasons he locks himself away in his ivory tower, and all the reasons they clutch so desperately to one another _despite _impossibility --

red is entropy, and the anticipation thereof.


	2. Orange

_"Try not thinking of peeling an orange. Try not imagining the juice running down your fingers, the soft inner part of the peel. The smell. Try and you can't. The brain doesn't process negatives."_  


* * *

Minerva McGonagall wears orange every third Thursday of every month.  
Albus Dumbledore can't for the life of him figure out why.

Every other day of the year she buries herself in deep, dark colors. Her wardrobe is a spectrum shut in the dark, comprised of black, navy, brown, crimson, and sometimes deep emerald. He has always thought that the colors complemented her perfectly well. The shadowy hues make her pale skin even brighter, the curves of her body even sharper, the keenness of her gaze more entrancing. Everything about her has always seemed to draw in light anyway, and so the gloomy attire never took away from her through Albus' eyes. But once the orange begins to show up, he changes his mind.

In orange, she shines. Orange makes her hair blacker, sleeker. He begins to notice each tiny tendril twisted into the braid that trails down the concave of her back. Orange brightens her eyes instead of detracting from them -- in orange, the green in her gaze is so overwhelming, so utterly entrancing that he admires only from a distance, because he can't trust himself around her when her eyes are so, so bright. Orange brings out the contrast of her skin, makes the shadows of her features more dramatic, and the highlights positively glow. When Minerva wears orange, even Professor Sprout's teaching assistant, a twenty year old with an impish grin, can't help but stare.  
_  
But why?_ The question plagues his mind endlessly. She never mentions it to anybody, not even her friends on the staff; he knows because he listens in, hoping he might catch some hint as to the logic behind the orange, behind the bright, blinding orange that colors the dreams he doesn't want to have and fills his thoughts even though he prefers them to be empty.

On the third Thursday in March, she approaches him to ask a question regarding a point in the curriculum she would like to change. He nods as she speaks, his sight overwhelmed by the color orange even though he is looking into her eyes and they're green.

"Headmaster?" She asks, her brow furrowing, her hand lifting to wave brusquely in front of his face. He adjusts his glasses.

"I'm sorry, my dear. What were you saying?"

"Nothing important," she responds sardonically, her brow raising further. "What is in your head today, sir?" Minerva asks. She is full of questions today. Albus decides that orange is inquisitive.

"Those delectable tangerine pastries one can procure from Adelaide Dearborn in Diagon Alley," he murmurs very seriously as he leans towards her as though to confide a secret. His expression is so very sincere, so convinced that his response is a valid one, that she doesn't really know how to respond. Albus is thinking about how wonderful tangerine tastes, how savory, how sweet, how melt-in-your-mouth wonderful apricot is, and then he slowly drifts into the citric delight of orange and his senses are colored by thoughts of sunset on the castle's east-most wall.

"Well," she huffs finally, "might I have just a moment of your attention? I hate to distract you from such tantamount thoughts..."

He chuckles softly, throwing his head back and opening his mouth in what Minerva sees as an overreaction, the kind he is prone to, and the kind she has always found endlessly endearing. He is tickled orange. "Whatever are you talking about, my darling Professor?"

She blinks. She doesn't understand. She's smart -- he wouldn't like her so much otherwise -- but when his meaning hovers slightly over even his head, he realizes she hasn't a prayer of catching it. So he explains.

"I simply mean to say my attentions have unfailingly been on you since you first entered the room. I suppose I was a little vague, hm?"

"Albus…" Minerva cautions, her eyes shifting jerkily downward in a quiet plea for him to remember that they're standing in a corner of the staff room with the orange glow of the fire making her into titian. "You are _always_ a wee bit vague." She adds, frowning her aggravation and peering at him, and in that moment, in that split second when she is framed and cast in apricot, a statue of Athena, lovely and scintillating and bright and so very, consummately, inquisitively, brazenly orange, he loses himself. He thinks that the date she chooses to glow is unimportant. The pattern is insignificant. The means, here, does not define her, and in his Machiavellian sensibility he recognizes that it is but the end he ought to appreciate.

In the end, he leaves with her on his lips, more potent than any orange savory, his head swimming with a symbolism he can't quite grasp and a wordless rationalization that sits like a fractional spectrum in the forefront of his mind. In the end, all that matters is that orange is just the bait. She has always been the hook.


	3. Yellow

_"The road to the City of Emeralds is paved with yellow brick."  


* * *

_

Yellow is the color of the biggest window in Minerva's classroom. It's roughly the width of her desk and stands twice her height, gilded and ornate -- it depicts a grinning sun, a spectrum of yellows and oranges and golds and whit-hot highlights. It's lovely, she muses sometimes, and in the evenings she hangs back, sitting at her desk with the window to her back. As the sun shines through, she finds her world painted warm goldenrod; happy, sleepy, bright, she feels like a bug fossilized into a shard of amber. She marks her papers, sips her tea with lemon, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays she nibbles a scone drenched with honey that glows citrine in the biased light.

It's her quiet time, her thinking time, her time to work and mull and just be. Alone in her quiet reflecting pool of yellow --

So when he interrupts, stirs the water and sends disruptive ripples her way, she is sufficiently annoyed. She looks at him until her expression narrows to a glare, and he meets her gaze with a smile as he transfigures the chair before her desk with something more suitable -- an outrageously colored arm chair. He lets out a low noise like a chuckle and folds his hands into his lap, bobbing his head as if to say _'proceed'_. She glares still, but in the light he looks less like her headmaster and more like a demigod, the yellow turning his hair to spun gold, his eyes so bright that she finally looks away with a frown. She wonders why his awesomeness hits her only in waves.

Sometimes he's a pale, laughing yellow, bright and sparkling like champagne, the bubbling warmth of his presence swallowing her whole until she's floating on the lake at four AM when the sun is too low to really glow. Sometimes he's a deep, Tuscan yellow, comfortable and familiar with laugh-lines and robes the color of melting better. Others still he's citrus, a sharp, darting yellow, a caricature of anxiousness and distant frowns, pliant hands and damning words. Now, though, he is none of those things.

From where she's sitting, he is simply golden, rife with power and wisdom with eyes like sunspots and thoughts like the glare off of a bicycle spoke.

She finishes her work but doesn't move, her shaky fingers flipping through a pile of parchment as though she still has much to do. She doesn't, but she knows not to look directly at the sun. Her mom told her once that she'd go blind doing that.

"It is getting quite late," he comments, sipping delicately at the tea he conjured a good twenty minutes ago. She shrugs mildly. "Perhaps you ought to consider postponing this work. There are limits to human effectiveness, you know --"

"I'm finished now, Albus, no need to badger." She responds waspishly, chancing a glance at him; his childishly wounded expression makes her sorry for the inexplicable frustration she feels towards him, but she can't help it. Nor does she necessarily want to. "Did you want something?" She asks, her tone still short and harsh. Minerva reclines in her chair, and, framed in yellow, her head encircled by the sun's image behind her, she is the stern-faced, unforgiving goddess of war, and he smiles, moving towards her with a fleetness that never ceases to surprise her. Her muscles clench instinctively as he wraps his hands around her shoulders. Gently, he rubs away her ill-ease until she leans back into him, her neck exposed as she turns her face upwards and allows her eyes to close slowly; her eyelids are garnished in yellow.

"You," he admits in that tone, that sickly, sallow, jaundiced tone that allows no comment. He bends and his lips find her forehead as he draws her from her chair and spins her so that her back is once more to the window so that he is shining like tanzanite, topaz, something--

She can't find the words to describe, but it makes her feel as though everything inside her is shrinking so that she gets emptier and emptier, an egg shell watching its yolk drip out. She wants to ask what he could possibly want her for. It's not because she feels inferior or self-flagellating -- she is strong and smart, and any man might be lucky to have her. However, he isn't altogether human, she thinks. Man is only the mask he wears because his true visage tends to make others uncomfortable -- martyr, she thinks, Judas or Jesus or someone grey and in between, draped in robes of sickly yellow, lit by that glowing firefly of conviction flitting within…

No, he's not quite human, never has been, and even if he is, he's only temporary. People have a tendency to look at his age as a badge of wisdom, as a declaration of knowledge, but she knows that he finds his centuries to be frail and inadequate. She remembers him telling her once that he was charged with the Atlas-shouldered intelligence no one man ought to possess, and she knows that he really sees it that way. Had there ever been a man as brilliant as he? Would there ever be one again? The question is so in flux. He has to be sure that his accomplishments that his contributions are substantial enough to balance his endowments on the cosmic scale of his imaginings. In the end, though, she knows that he'll come up short. Everybody comes up short in the eyes of Albus Dumbledore, if not only because he is well acquainted with the concept of human error. Her head spins like the racing heart of a saffron-winged hummingbird as she feels her back press against the window, and then suddenly stops. Suddenly, abruptly, she gets it.

With her back preventing the sunlight from filtering through, he looks so normal. His eyes are bright, but he is dim, shadowed, and without the benefit of the color yellow shaded gold, she can see the shadows along his eyes, the gauntness of his cheeks, the lines surrounding his mouth so that it seems he'll never smile again. She reaches up to trace the crease on his face, as though she might smooth them out. In this light, he is hers, but only because she makes him so, because she refuses to acknowledge the reality, because even he needs absolution.

"Are you propositioning me?" She asks with a frown, her fingers tracing over his frowning lips.

"No," he responds honestly, leaning down to kiss her forehead before they drop slowly to the ground, below the grinning sun's line of sight.

He shifts so that he sits next to her, and in the dim, gurgling dark that exists beneath the zenith he is human, and he is hers. He swallows and closes his eyes, and she runs a hand along the side of his face.

Without yellow turning him to gold, she notices his hand for the first time. She swallows her gasp, and instead of letting the meaningfulness of it drown her, she reaches over and draws it into her lap, her fingers gently stroking the dead, suppurated skin. Their world is so often yellow -- sharp, honest yellow that seeks and sees and haunts and denies them each other. As the sun sets, though, they thrive the shadows: in the shadows, he is hers, and not the public property of their tumultuous world.


End file.
